New Book Series: The Apostolic Fathers Greek Reader

Near the start of 2013 Rick Brannan began a 2 ClementFaithlife reading group and subsequently William Varner offered to lead a Didache reading group. At that time I decided to see if I could make a useful PDF of vocabularly words for the Didache. I knew how to easily make a list of words occurring X amount of times but that wasn’t necessarily helpful since my the breadth of my vocabulary knowledge was based on the frequency in the New Testament. After much trial and error I figured out how to make a list of words that occurred 30x or less in the New Testament and cross-check that with every word in the Didache. The result was a list of words that I had not memorized from my NT studies regardless of how many times it occurred in the Didache.

Around the same time Shawn Wilhite, who I never met, was wanting to lead a reading group at the SBTS library on the Didache. Ironically, he found my blog post and contacted me to see if he could use the list. We came to find out that we were both students at Southern (I was still in my MDiv and he was beginning Phd work) so we got together and made some plans and he led the group.[1]

About a year past and Shawn had a great idea that we should build a reader for all the Apostolic Fathers writings. After much trial and error we finally figured out a format that we like and embarked on footnoting all vocabularly occurences occuring 30x or less in the New Testament. We quickly realized that this was going to take forever so we decided to elicit help from qualified people to work on the footnoting. I would provide them with the vocabulary list and they would do the tedious work of making footnotes for everything. Shortly thereafter, Michael Halcomb and Fredrick Long from GlossaHouse contacted us seeing if we would be interested in publishing the AFGR with them. We were estastic! GlossaHouse has already produced a number of extremely helpful Greek resources so we were honored to add this to the library.

Well, today is the today! The first volume of Ignatius’s letters is now available! You can purchase it here on Amazon.

Thanks to Fredrick Long and Michael Halcomb for both the opportunity to publish these resources and all their hard work to make this a reality.

The rest of the series will be released in the following order:

The Letters of Ignatius (Vol. 1)

The Didache and The Epistle of Barnabas (Vol. 2)

Polycarp, Papias, and Mathetes to Diognetus (Vol. 3)

1–2 Clement (Vol. 4)

The Shepherd of Hermas (Vol. 5)

Shawn is now one of my best friends who has helped shape me both personally and academically…who said blogging doesn’t have its benefits?! ↩